Being someone for whom aloneness feels like living burial, I suppose I could have chosen a more suitable life than one involving so much reading, writing, and filmgoing. True, you do sit among dozens to hundreds of others when you see a movie, but that strikes me as isolation by other means. I suppose […]
Santa Barbara lacks many things, but when I lived there, never did I want for pleasant coffee shops in which to work. Coffee Cat on Anacapa, The Daily Grind on Mission, The French Press on Carrillo, Cafe Zoma on State, Santa Barbara Roasting Company on Motor Way, Hot Spots on lower-lower State if the wee […]
This book came recommended by no less an authority than Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin when last I interviewed him. It’d intrigued me on runs to the downtown library to replenish my supply of Los Angeles-related reading, but I kept reshelving it; the subtitle Painful Lessons in Post-New York Living made me […]
We used to have the greatest public transportation system in the world, so goes the oft-told Los Angeles lore. Then, a shady consortium, their own strings pulled by automakers and road-builders, bought all the trains and the tracks just to rip them out and scrap them. I don’t know about that; I sense a few […]
When I noticed this book on a downtown library shelf, the prospect of a twenty-year-old assessment of Los Angeles by Susan Sontag’s “polemicist” son did not immediately appeal. Thinking of Sontag’s cultural affiliations with New York and Europe, one easily envisions nothing more than a prolonged dismissal of this city as a vast, backward hellscape […]
Upon hearing that I’d never read it, an interviewee with three Los Angeles years on me pressed his personal copy of Ask the Dust into my hands. I had felt some responsibility and curiosity about the book, since it occupies the unusual position of a 1930s Los Angeles novel that “everyone” is suddenly reading again. […]
The Livejournalist formerly known as Cobalt999 came to visit Los Angeles last week, and before he arrived, I thought I’d link him up to a few items on the web to prepare him for the city. Combing through my bookmarks got me thinking about what I’d include in a more general internet-based Los Angeles primer. […]
Only natural, I figure, to go from the Images of America book on where I live in Los Angeles to the Images of America book on a neighborhood that first fired up my interest in Los Angeles. Before I moved, visits to Little Tokyo underscored Santa Barbara’s failure to provide certain necessities: ramen shops, sit-down […]
Here we have a sheaf of dozen-year-old restaurant reviews. Yet here we also have what the New Yorker calls “one of the great contemporary books about Los Angeles.” Sure, the magazine distances itself from that accolade, attributing it to a nebulous group of “people,” but it does so in a profile of Jonathan Gold that […]